Earth poems

All summer I heard them rustling in the shrubbery, outracing me from tier to tier in my garden, a whisper among the viburnums, a signal flashed from the hedgerow, a shadow pulsing in the barberry thicket. Now that the nights are chill and the annuals spent, I should have thought them gone, in a torpor of blood slipped to the nether world before the sickle frost. Not so. In the deceptive balm of noon, as if defiant of the curse that...

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth’s face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold...

I leant upon a coppice gate, When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to me The Century’s corpse outleant, Its crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind its death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and...

What is reverence? A formal posture in church such as kneeling, or something more? An attitude of mind, and heart? More than respect for God? Respect for others, and even the physical world around us? Sacred earth. The sole footing on which we stand. Like parrots perched, on a small ball we’re bound. Human squabbling; killing, warring—to what gain? Instead of recognizing we’re set on holy ground. With large arrogance we strut our...

To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must...

Crow realized God loved him— Otherwise, he would have dropped dead. So that was proved. Crow reclined, marveling, on his heart-beat. And he realized that God spoke Crow— Just exiting was His revelation. But what Loved the stones and spoke stone? They seemed to exist too. And what spoke that strange silence After his clamor of caws faded? And what loved the shot-pellets That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows? What spoke...

I believe in magic. I believe in the rights of animals to leap out of our skins as recorded in the Kiowa legend: Directly there was a bear where the boy had been as I believe in the resurrected wake-robin, first wet knob of trillium to knock in April at the underside of earth’s door in central New Hampshire where bears are though still denned up at that early greening. I believe in living on grateful terms with the earth, with...

Veritas sequitur… In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there! Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the...

How I loved one like you when I was little!— With his stripes of silver and his small house of his back, Making a slow journey around the well-curb. I longed to be like him, and was, In my way, close cousin To the dirt, my knees scrubbing The gravel, my nose wetter than his. When I slip, just slightly, in the dark, I know it isn’t a wet leaf, But you, loose toe from the old life, The cold slime come into being, A fat, five-inch...

1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies. In the frog pond the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, I hear its drone, drifting, high up in immaculate ozone. 2 And I hear, coming over the hills, America singing, her varied carols I hear: crack of deputies’ rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night,...

I must tell you this young tree whose round and firm trunk between the wet pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises bodily into the air with one undulant thrust half its height— and then dividing and waning sending out young branches on all sides— hung with cocoons it thins till nothing is left of it but two eccentric knotted twigs bending forward hornlike at the top (William Carlos...

For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill– we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to...

For Grace Bulmer Bowers From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets; on red,...

God, when you thought of a pine tree, How did you think of a star? How did you dream of the Milky Way To guide us from afar? How did you think of a clean brown pool Where flecks of shadows are? God, when you thought of a cobweb, How did you think of dew? How did you know a spider’s house Had shingles bright and new? How did you know the human folk Would love them like they do? God, when you patterned a bird song, Flung on a...

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods,...

I entered the life of the brown forest And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins In the throat of the mountain… and I was the stream Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars, Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness Outside the stars, I included them, they were part of me. I was mankind...

I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. Mine is the mysterious force of the invisible wind. I sustain the breath of all living. I breathe in the verdure and in the flowers, and when the waters flow like living things, It is I…I am Wisdom…I am Life. (Hildegard of...

I stand, transparent, on the edge of space. Whole galaxies pass through me each moment, Each atom a golden sun, radiant with light. I am Light! I am Energy! I am Sound and Music! The world forms around me, ideas in the night. I am the Earth and all life therein: The sun, the stars, the wind, and the rain; The divine perfection within all things. Through me the Universe now acts and feels, Sees itself, knows love and joy, Sorrow,...